Last Mile

Businesses that directly deal with customers probably want them to have best customer experience but that is generally not delivered in a way that most businesses and customers would like to. Businesses normally spend a lot of time hiring and training people who are in the backend and but not their frontline workers. The frontline workers who directly interact the customers are many times contractors, outsourced or temporary. The call centers that service customer calls are one thing that everyone would agree delivers a very bad experience.

Now it is not always true that one gets always a bad experience but scaling this up with number of interactions that one goes through it is very likely that there are more bad experiences than good.

A Recent Example

Recently I changed my broadband connection that I had been using from 2014. It was from Airtel, there used to be a time I was using broadband, cable, two mobile phone connections ( mine and wife). I did away with Cable long time back due to the society. Broadband was something I was not able to as the other option was BSNL which I was not able to gather courage to move to.

Telecom companies have not been considering their last mile approach very well and I fail to understand why is that. One could hire the best top management, pay them well, get the best servers and software but if one doesn’t focus on the last mile all top notch stuff that you claim to have is useless

For a broadband the last mile would mean the copper or fibre from the local switch to home, setting up the WiFi hotspot and configuration. The most important part is the cable from the switch to the home WiFi hotspot and if it is not done well it can be huge issue to handle and can lead to bad customer experience throughout. 

Now the apartment I live is somewhat old and all the internal wiring are decade old and my broadband Airtel was on copper wire which was 20 years old. My WiFi connection was very flaky and I couldn’t use it for meetings or anything other than YouTube (probably it is designed to work on bad network I guess). Couple of years back Airtel called me up and suggested me to go over to fiber. Everytime they came home (4-5 times) over two years they neither found out an cabling or any alternative. They even asked to find an electrician and get it done on my own cost.

In comes competition, Jio Fiber started in my apartment and I registered thinking they will sort the wiring themselves. But their technician came and said getting the wire from the duct to my flat is my responsibility and they can’t help. They gave me an electrician’s number (after requesting quite a bit) who after calling multiple times, came and then vanished and stopped picking up. I then went to another local electrical shop and that guy surveyed and asked two more days. By the time I booked an electrician on Urban Clap and they sent a guy who was kind of novice and overcharged but was willing to try options. Apartment folks wanted POP wiring but that needed holes to be drilled. We got a double sided 3M tape that could hold the POP brackets but unfortunately the whitewashed wall are not fit as they rip off. The distance was about 20m and in order to drill there was a drilling machine needed with long wire or a portable one with battery and this electrician had none.

To cut the story short I somehow worked with the electrician and got the fiber fixed until my flat and finally the Jio folks came and fixed the hotspot. 

Is there a better approach?

Now this whole approach from both Airtel and Jio, probably the best telecom companies in India, is something which is not acceptable but they can get away with this because they know customers have very limited options.   

I know that we have come to much better place these days as against how things were probably 10 years back. But now there is definitely a complacency in these companies (I was paying 1400*24= 33600 over two years for a very bad service to Airtel).

How to fix this?

As far as last mile is concerned it is a difficult problem to fix but do these firms have the means to do it, yes of course. But they don’t have willingness to do anything about it.

Having a public sector company like BSNL that provides basic services in a very good way that these private companies cannot undercut. They are encouraged to provided better than minimum services provided by public sector.

The private companies needs figure out a way to help the individual customers knowing very well what these folks are getting at the end of day. Routine customer service call center folks talk mostly like robots without worrying about what the customer is facing. 

End of the day I spent about 2000/- on installation without getting what I really wanted. The wires are not done in the most professional way and it may lead to issues later on as well.